Hello all, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! I’ve got a fresh pile of films I watched this week, including Masaaki Yuasa’s latest feature, along with another boatload of variably watchable horror films. Along with me personally being a big horror fan, horror is also one of the few genres I can always convince my housemates to take a chance on, so we end up screening a fair number of blood-curdling features around my apartment. The pickings were pretty solid this week, so let’s not waste any more time, and dive into the latest Week in Review!

My most noteworthy new media experience this week was undoubtedly Ride Your Wave, the latest film from Masaaki Yuasa and his talented team at Science Saru. I greatly enjoyed Ride Your Wave, while at the same time feeling it’s undoubtedly one of the most uneven Yuasa works I’ve experienced. But even in the ways it flounders (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), Ride Your Wave still seems indicative of positive trends coming out of Yuasa’s studio

In many ways, the film feels like a test case for Studio Saru’s reliance on Flash animation. Many of the tricks with water and perspective that this film pulls off would be prohibitively difficult to convey through traditional animation; given that premise, the fact that the CG sometimes looks far from convincing, or the composite of characters and backgrounds is often a little loose, is almost to be expected. Yuasa is an artist who’s always happiest exploring the limits of the possible, from his first film Mind Game all through his current projects. As someone who generally prefers polish over invention, I know not all of his works will be equally appealing to me – and frankly, every artistic field needs people like Yuasa, who are willing to explore the far fringes of content and technique, and whose failures and discoveries eventually serve to inform a generally expanded artistic palette.

Of course, all those qualifications are not to say Ride Your Wave is a bad film. On the contrary, aside from some nagging visual issues and its occasionally overbearing thematic argument, it’s truly a poignant, beautiful, and inventive film, illustrating a resonant story of love, grief, and growing up. As someone with profound career anxieties who also recently experienced close personal grief, Ride Your Wave’s depictions of the messiness of finding yourself, and the gradual, subtly shifting nature of mourning, really punched me in the gut. The characters are intensely likable, and the film is full of completely convincing incidental conversations – which should be no surprise, given Reiko Yoshida (K-On!, Girls und Panzer, Tamako Love Story, Liz and the Blue Bird, etc etc etc) was on scriptwriting. 

Along with Yoshida on script, Ride Your Wave also benefits profoundly from Takashi Kojima’s character designs and animation direction. Ride Your Wave’s characters have some of the most expressive, appealing base designs of any recent anime, and their personalities come through clearly in their every movement. Having recently made his mark within the critical anime community for his phenomenal work on Flip Flappers, it’s wonderful to see Kojima getting steady work among anime’s other art-for-art’s-sake creators – which in turn, points to one of Science Saru’s most indispensable qualities. Ultimate quality of their individual works aside, Science Saru is becoming a haven for anime’s most talented new creators, and genuinely enriching anime’s future. They’re one of the brightest hopes for anime, and I hope to enjoy more of their works for many years to come.

Over in live action territory, I watched the surprisingly competent 13 Sins, a film about a man who’s forced to complete increasingly demented “challenges” to win a contest for millions of dollars. 13 Sins is essentially an episode of Black Mirror framed in the cadence of an American horror-thriller, and if you’re a fan of Black Mirror, this is a fine example of the formula. Any sort of social critique here is kept in the fringes – this is clearly a story about a society where monsters force us to kill each other for table scraps, and subsequently thank the monsters for the privilege, but it’s mostly just a high-intensity thriller with a pleasing grab bag of anxious setpieces, one that manages to never feel mean-spirited in its portrayal of its characters.

An excellent lead performance by Mark Webber ties the whole thing together – he comes across as a convincingly fraying man trending towards a monster, and yet remains a sympathetic figure throughout, which is crucial to the film’s ultimate disbursement of blame regarding the whole scenario. And fortunately, the film never stoops to the grotesque murder-porn that its premise could easily imply; violence is employed briefly and effectively throughout, while the greater threat is perpetually “what will be left of me if I submit to this task?” If you enjoy feeling anxious and hunted for ninety minutes, it’s a pretty solid time.

Continuing on the horror kick, I also watched Little Monsters, an Australian horror-comedy that only really seemed interesting because it starred Lupita Nyong’o, the electrifying heroine of last year’s Us. Tragically, Nyong’o isn’t actually the protagonist of Little Monsters – that’s Alexander England, cast as an incredibly obnoxious manchild who Nyong’o helps turn into a pretty decent person. The first thirty or so minutes of Little Monsters are a genuine chore to get through, as we’re stuck in England’s Cartman-as-an-adult level perspective and sense of humor, but things perk up considerably when Nyong’o enters the scene, and doubly so when the class outing she’s leading turns into a zombie invasion scenario. Little Monsters’ comedy is often crude and mean-spirited, but Nyong’o is an actress with such a dynamic presence, and such a tremendous ability to shift between gentle kindness and iron strength, that she basically carries the film into watchable territory all by herself.

I also at last watched one of the few essential ‘80s horror films I’ve missed, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Having read a fair number of Barker’s terrific short stories, I knew some of what was coming for me in Hellraiser – the man is fascinated with the uncomfortably thin line between sexual pleasure and agony, and many of his stories center on ecstatic, violent transformations, as characters rebuild themselves and question what is truly “them” over the course of an experience that defies human reason, or emphasizes the frailty and mutability of our human shells.

Hellraiser offers all of that shit in spades, though given the primacy of the sado-masochistic Cenobites in the film’s marketing and public image, I was a little surprised to find the majority of this film instead centered on a “Little Shop of Horrors”-esque twisted love story. That’s probably for the best, though; in spite of being known for gruesome creations on par with Carpenter, Barker actually exercises consistent constraint in his writing, and lets the monstrousness emerge from the base and all-too-human desires of his characters. And when the truly horrific stuff hits, Hellraiser doesn’t shy away; the film’s practical gore effects are some of the most compelling I’ve seen, and the fundamental threat of the Cenobites’ cube captures a strain of horror largely untapped by popular film, but which has clearly bled into modern and online culture’s horror sensibilities. Somewhat clumsy leads performances keep Hellraiser firmly in the genre bucket, but its compelling monster concepts and gleefully messy relationships make it a must-watch for any horror fan.

Lastly, and also leastly, I finished off this week’s horror expeditions with the utterly pointless 1408. 1408 seemed interesting because B-list premises rarely earn A-list casts, but this Stephen King-derived story of an evil hotel room starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, and Tony Shalhoub (!) is unfortunately a total waste of its cast, and features basically no original ideas or effective scares whatsoever. Lacking any compelling cinematography, novel horror concepts, or convincing character work to genuinely pay attention to, I instead spent a great deal of this film feeling quietly annoyed that Cusack’s writer character kept using his voice recorder to simply punctuate what he was already saying, rather than actually take any useful notes. 1408 is a waste of time, but at least I know that now!